The "Big 3" Department Stores: Their Life and Times

Bambergers - Kresges - Hahnes

Downtown Newark in
the first half of the last century had something to attract everybody -- a
variety of theatres, and a wealth of shops of every type -- five and tens,
specialty stores, clothing and shoe stores, and other stores offering virtually
everything one could want.

Between their wide
range of merchandise offerings and their seasonal offerings and colorful
displays, including Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for the kiddies, the big
three department stores were the crown jewels of downtown Newark shopping.

All are now gone and
remain only in the memories of Newark old-timers, but the paragraphs following
open a window to their past glory and a brief look into the origins and lives of
each of them and their lasting impact on the City of Newark.

L. Bamberger & Co.

Bamberger's was
actually the newest of the "big 3" in terms of longevity. Louis
Bamberger had purchased the original store at auction in 1892. It was on
the corner of Market and Halsey Streets. It proved an immediate success
and after a number of expansions on the same block, in 1912 he put up an
entirely new building bounded by Market, Halsey, Washington, and Bank Streets.

By the mid-1920s,
Bamberger's employed 2,800 people and was ranked in the top five department
stores in the country in terms of sales volume. I recall the
Bamberger-owned delivery trucks (a 36-vehicle fleet) that would deliver any purchase or order without
charge.

An acquaintance of
Louis Bamberger, recalling him in the days when he actively operated the store,
described him thus: He would come into the side entrance of the store on
Washington Street. He would have a gray homburg, in light gray or dark
clothes and a walking stick with a gold tip. He would catch admiring
glances as he walked into his store. The Bamberger coworkers adored
him. When he died in March 1944 (see obituary1), he left money for every
employee that had worked there for a certain period of time.

Bamberger, to the
best of my knowledge, never married and was extremely generous to the City of
Newark and its institutions.

He made a major
capital gift to the High Street 'Y' which enabled it to open in 1925 in a
magnificent three-story Georgian brick $500,000 building.

In 1926, Louis
Bamberger gave the City of Newark a new $750,000 limestone building to house the
Newark Museum. It was a replacement for a pre-Civil War wood framed
mansion.

Bamberger also was a
major donor to the building of the New Jersey Historical Society in north
Newark, and was a patron of the Newark Public
Library.

In 1928, the year
before he sold his store to R. H. Macy, he also became a major donor to the new
Beth Israel Hospital2, a 12 story
Spanish-style hospital with 350 beds on Lyons Avenue in the Weequahic section of
Newark.

Such was the power
and prestige of the "Bamberger" name in Newark that, although Macy had
owned the store since 1929, it did not change the Newark store name to
"Macy" until 1986, fifty seven years after the purchase, and just six
years before the store's final closing.

The store closed in
Newark in 1992.

Bamberger's Clock

The famous
Bamberger's Clock on the corner of Market and Halsey Streets was a favorite
Downtown Newark meeting place for generations of Newarkers. At the start
of the twenty-first century, the famed Bamberger Clock was still in place at its
original site, and still marking time for downtown Newark shoppers and workers.

* * *

Kresge's Department Store

Kresge's Department
Store occupied the downtown Newark block bounded by Cedar, Halsey, and Broad
Streets, and Raymond Boulevard. Its official address was 715 Broad
Street. The Raymond Boulevard side of the store was the former site of the
Morris Canal. The Canal bed had become the Newark City Subway and was
topped by a new street called Raymond Boulevard.

Kresge's was a stop
on the Newark City Subway and had decorated basement show windows at the station
stop to attract subway
riders.

Kresge's Department
Store, which in its later years called itself Kresge * Newark, was known to its
thousands of loyal customers as just "Kresge's."

The store site was
the oldest department store site in Newark. The store had originally
opened in 1870, operated by the three Plaut brothers, Simon, Louis and
Moses. It built a huge following as Newark's first and only department
store as "The Bee Hive" although customers liked to refer to the store
as "Plaut's".

The store became the
Kresge Department Store in 1923 when the Plaut brothers sold their business to
Sebastian S. Kresge for $17 million.

As the store
continued to thrive, in 1926, Kresge replaced the old Plaut Bee Hive with a
ten-story brown brick structure.

While the new
building loomed large on Broad Street, it faced just across Military Park from
another new building erected that same year called the Military Park
Building. At twenty one stories, it was the tallest building in New Jersey
at that time.

* * *

During World War 2, many Kresge
employees left for service in the armed forces. The store maintained mail
links with them and regularly reported on their doings through its employee
magazine, the K. D. S. News 3.

Early in July 1945, newly returned from overseas military service in World War
II, I visited Kresge-Newark, as it was then known, to be a featured guest on a
daily radio program broadcast from the store, called the Kresge * Newark
Magazine of the Air.

Advertisements in the
Newark Evening News and the Newark Star-Ledger the day before the broadcast
contained this notice: "Tomorrow's Featured Guest: Nat G. Bodian, former
South Atlantic Correspondent for 'YANK' MAGAZINE. You are invited to
attend our broadcast of Fun and Interesting Entertainment."

I later received a
letter 4 from the Kresge-Newark Radio Editor telling me "Your talk was
extremely interesting and we have heard many favorable comments on it."

* * *

The life span of the
Kresge Department Store, which began in 1923, came to an end in 1964, forty one
years later. In that year, the Kresge Foundation, a charity of Sebastian
S. Kresge, sold all of the store's stock to David T. Chase.

With that purchase,
the new name of the Kresge-Newark store became Chase-Newark as of June 1964.

The Chase reign as a
Newark department store ended in January 1967 when Chase-Newark Corporation
announced it had leased the Newark store to the "Two Guys"
chain. An auction was held on the premises to removed the Chase-Newark
contents in March 1967.

Among the non-Jewish
organizations the Plaut family supported financially were the Red Cross, Navy
Club of the United States, the National and Newark Chambers of Commerce, the
Newark Musical Festival Association, and the New Jersey Historical Society.

* * *

Hahne & Company

Newark's First

Hahne & Company
was Newark's first department store. It actually began in 1858 as a bird
cage store at the corner of Central Avenue and Broad Street, a dirt-covered 132-foot wide road that became a
muddy swamp after every rainfall."

Its founder was Julius Hahne, a
former pocketbook maker, who employed his three sons in the store, Albert, August, and
Richard.

By 1862, five years after Broad
Street was paved for the first time, the store was dealing in general merchandise and the Newark City Directory of that year had
the business listed as "dealers in toys and fancy goods."

Newarkers of the late
19th century took to the store and it expanded into 641 and 643 Broad
Street. Toward the end of the century, the Hahnes board of directors,
consisting of Julius' sons, Richard, Albert, and August, and the husband of his
daughter Clara, William H. Kellner made plans for a grand new building.

They commissioned the
architect Goldwin Starrett to design a building that would stand out on Broad Street.
The four-story
building, on 23 acres, which would later be considered a national
treasure 5 was completed and opened in 1901 at
605-625 Broad Street, with 407,500 square feet of floor
space.

At its opening, the
Newark Daily Advertiser 6 described the new store as "one of the
largest and most elegant stores in America." Its construction
had consumed 7,000 tons of steel and 6 million bricks, and it contained nearly
two acres of plate glass
windows.

The Hahne family
lived in a fashionable townhouse residence at 45 Lincoln Park, at the other end
of Broad Street, and were recognizable as they rode in their horse-drawn
carriage up Broad Street to their store in the early years of the 20th century.

During the Hahne family ownership
of the department store, matching the generosity of the other two
"Big 3" store owners, the Hahnes generously supported many civic
projects of the Federation of Women's Clubs, and contributed to numerous Newark
social and cultural institutions.

The Store

Hahne & Company maintained a
loyal and largely upscale following during most of its 85 year history. In
its earlier years, it was the store where Newark's wealthiest families arrived
in handsome carriages to do their shopping.

Unlike its two major competitors,
Hahne & Co., despite two changes of ownership, kept the same name throughout
its life in Newark. Control of the company passed from the Hahne family to
R. H. Macy on the eve of World War 1.

From the mid-1970s until its
closing, it had been a division of Associated Dry Goods, a New York based
holding company, which at that time also included Lord & Taylor.

The store was closed by its owners
in 1986 after it had become unprofitable.

The two restaurants
in Hahnes were a favorite eating place for many downtown Newark shoppers and
workers. Shoppers favored the more upscale pine-paneled restaurant toward
the back on the main floor. Downtown workers, out for lunch, favored the
downstairs low-eating-counter luncheonette with the fixed chair swivel seats.

* * *

My First Hahne's Experience

Just weeks after our
marriage in June 1947, my wife and I were fortunate enough to find an apartment
and to vacate our furnished attic room at 595 Hunterdon Street. Our first
necessity was a bedroom set.

We went to Hahne's
after friends told us the store had an excellent furniture department. At
Hahne's, my wife and I spotted a marked-down light-wood mahogany bedroom set
that had been used as a display model. We both flipped over it and it was
the first major purchase of our marriage.

We finally replace it
in 1982, after 35 years of use. Still in reasonably good condition, we
donated it to the Salvation Army.